The cigarettes commercially available today do not provide the exotic blends of tobacco preferred by many smokers. Such smokers generally purchase their tobacco and cigarette papers separately and individually prepare their cigarettes. While cigarette rolling machines are commercially available, many smokers prefer to prepare their cigarettes in a completely manual fashion, wherein a cigarette paper is manually rolled around a portion of tobacco.
Such manually-prepared cigarettes, however, suffer from several deficiencies. First, the cigarette papers commercially available are generally much thinner than the papers used in the commercial cigarette brands, thereby providing the manually prepared cigarette with little longitudinal support. Second, the manually-prepared cigarettes do not come equipped with the filters used by the commercial cigarette manufacturers, thereby eliminating the mouthpiece for the cigarette provided by the filters. Accordingly, in the final stages of the consumption of the cigarette, the cigarette must be held a small distance away from the smoker's mouth to prevent burning of the smoker's lips.
Few improvements have been made which would obviate these problems. One improvement is exemplified in U.S. Pat. No. 4,033,358 (Harrington). In this patent, a cigarette paper is provided with an integral cigarette holder which is simply a wire permanently mounted along one longitudinal edge of the cigarette paper. As the cigarette is consumed, more of the wire is exposed, thereby allowing the smoker to use the exposed wire as a holder. However, the integral cigarette paper holder elements disclosed by Harrington are not reusable because the papers come prefabricated with the wire, thereby necessitating the disposal of the wire after consumption of the cigarette.
No other devices exist in the prior art which completely solve the problem of providing longitudinal strengthening of a cigarette with a reusable device that also functions as a cigarette holder and rolling guide. Accordingly, it is the principal object of the present invention to longitudinally strengthen manually-prepared cigarettes, while simultaneously providing a holder for such cigarettes.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a reusable device which provides a rolling guide for manually prepared cigarettes, which longitudinally strengthens the cigarette, and which also functions as a cigarette holder.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a cigarette rolling, strengthening, and holding device which is usable with all cigarette papers commercially available.
It is another object of the present invention to prevent burning of a smoker's mouth with a cigarette in the final stages of consumption.